Evidence map›Paper›PMID 25158761›Full record

ArticleScientific reports2014

Critical limitations of consensus clustering in class discovery.

Yasin Șenbabaoğlu, George Michailidis, Jun Z Li

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Scientific reports, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 217 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
217citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

217 citing papers in PubMed.

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  7. Ensemble clustering: A practical tutorial.Behavior research methods · 2026
    Article
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157 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Yasin Șenbabaoğlu1] Department of Computational Medicine &Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA [2].
George MichailidisDepartment of Statistics and EECS, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Jun Z LiDepartment of Human Genetics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.

Funding

Integromics with Application to Prostate Cancer ProgressionRC1CA145444 · NCI · UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR · PI MICHAILIDIS, GEORGE · 2009 to 2010
$999k
NCI NIH HHS RC1 CA145444
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Consensus clustering (CC) has been adopted for unsupervised class discovery in many genomic studies. It calculates how frequently two samples are grouped together in repeated clustering runs, and uses the resulting pairwise "consensus rates" for visual demonstration that clusters exist, for comparing cluster stability, and for estimating the optimal cluster number (K). However, the sensitivity and specificity of CC have not been systemically assessed. Through simulations we find that CC is able to divide randomly generated unimodal data into apparently stable clusters for a range of K, essentially reporting chance partitions of cluster-less data. For data with known structure, the common implementations of CC perform poorly in identifying the true K. These results suggest that CC should be applied and interpreted with caution. We found that a new metric based on CC, the proportion of ambiguously clustered pairs (PAC), infers K equally or more reliably than similar methods in simulated data with known K. Our overall approach involves the use of realistic null distributions based on the observed gene-gene correlation structure in a given study, and the implementation of PAC to more accurately estimate K. We discuss the strength of our approach in the context of other ensemble-based methods.

Indexed as

Models, GeneticAlgorithmsCluster AnalysisComputer SimulationEpistasis, GeneticGenes

Identifiers

PMID25158761
PMCPMC4145288

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY-NC-SA
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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.